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Originally Posted by techhelpbb
Starting a limited liability company as a sole proprietor would allow the owner to declare liability limits for non-illegal or intentional negligence. Might be a good idea if you are selling something that involves kids engineering. I have done this several times in NJ...
In 24 hours you can: start a website, get a VoIP forwarded toll free number, setup a store online, register a business name at the county seat, get a UPS store mailbox you can address as a suite. In 1-2 weeks you can get a federal tax ID if you intend to hire employees beside yourself or if it actually turns out FIRST requires it. Be aware the ID makes it clear you will collect sales and use tax (be careful about use tax). You can usually get an ST3 for tax exempt resale in less than 2 weeks after this. Legally your SSN is adequate if you do not have employees (you are not scapegoating taxes, the income and risk is yours directly). You should also get business liability insurance and a business checking account (try a credit union to reduce the minimum start deposit or monthly fees) once you get your certificates from the state. Then you are legally a business. There is no law, just some zoning issues, which stop you from running a distribution and even light production business from a residential home. Just do not make toxic waste or anything illegal.
You are likely going to spend $750-$1,000 to start such a business. Assuming you don't pre-pay for the services being consumed initially (usually not the best idea). Then you will be looking at $250-$400 a month of operating costs (insurance $150, phone $20, website $10, mailbox $70). You may need an accountant to help you file the sales/use tax and the taxes and they will likely cost more money. On the plus side: consider that operating a business out of your home has certain tax advantages. You can write a portion of your home off for business use but it must be used mostly for that purpose. You can potentially write off vehicle use. You can write off a proportional amount of your electricity, cooling and heating costs for the business portion of the home. Expect that yearly costs of operation will be several thousand dollars.
Now the question is: will the product still be cheap if you do all of this?
The answer might be no, and in the case of this encoder, I would suggest finding additional markets outside of FIRST because even a single issue might put you underwater.
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Regarding licensing it can vary significantly by the state and the specific local municipality, especially with regards to a home based business. Zoning laws are laws and do vary by municipality. Many will not allow anything that resembles manufacturing to take place in a residential zone. Violations can bring fines and failure to comply with an order to correct can result in potential jail time in some municipalities.
Another thing that hasn't been mentioned is any Home Owner's Association rules on home based businesses. They can be very strict in some cases.
The time to get a license issued can vary as well. I know in the city where I used to run a home based business it took about 2 weeks from the time I turned in my application and money until it was approved and issued. In that case it had to be approved by a number of different departments. For example I had to talk to the fire chief and answer a number of questions before he decided to approve it and send it off to the next person on the list.
But yes in many cases getting a business legally operating is not that hard, expensive or take that long to make happen.
Other things to think about are taxes that again can vary. In my state there are B&O taxes based on the amount of sales. The city I operated in had their own version of wage taxes where there was a per hour, per employee tax rate that applied to anyone working in the city and to people working for businesses based in the city even if they are doing work outside of the city.
TLDR: Things vary depending on locality and anyone that wants to start a business needs to carefully research the specifics that apply to their location and type of business.